Miracle to Meltdown: A Pathology of the East Asian Financial Crisis

For most of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s the newly industrialising countries of East Asia were held up as the world’s most dramatic economic success story. They were characterised by exceptionally rapid rates of economic growth and human development, by relatively low inflation and by an absence of balance of payments difficulties. During the 1980s, when Latin America was experiencing severe debt crises, East Asia managed to avoid them. The size of capital inflows to the region in the first half of the 1990s suggested that capital markets expected the East Asian success story to continue.